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This paper presents an extended annotation and analysis of interpretative reply relations focusing on a comparison of reply relation types and targets between conflictual pages and neutral pages of German Wikipedia (WP) talk pages. We briefly present the different categories identified for interpretative reply relations to analyze the relationship between WP postings as well as linguistic cues for each category. We investigate referencing strategies of WP authors in discussion page postings, illustrated by means of reply relation types and targets taking into account the degree of disagreement displayed on a WP talk page. We provide richly annotated data that can be used for further analyses such as the identification of interactional relations on higher levels, or for training tasks in machine learning algorithms.
This paper presents the IVK-Ler corpus, a longitudinal, annotated learner corpus of weekly writings produced by a group of 18 adolescents in a preparatory class. The corpus consists of 117 student texts collected between 2020 and 2021 and has a structure layered by student and text number. It includes metadata that enables researchers to analyze and track individual student progress in terms of syntactic competence and literacy. The annotation schema, manual and automatic annotation processes, and corpus representation are described in detail. The corpus currently includes target hypotheses and gold standard part-of-speech tags. Future work could include additional annotation layers for topological fields and dependency relations, as well as semantic and discourse annotations to make the corpus usable for tasks beyond syntactic evaluations.
Seit der Forschung große Datenmengen und Rechenkapazitäten zur Verfügung stehen arbeitet auch die Sprachwissenschaft zunehmend datengeleitet. Datengeleitete Forschung geht nicht von einer Hypothese aus, sondern sucht nach statistischen Auffälligkeiten in den Daten. Sprache wird dabei oft stark vereinfacht als lineare Abfolge von Wörtern betrachtet. Diese Studie zeigt erstmals, wie der zusätzliche Einbezug syntaktischer Annotationen dabei hilft, sprachliche Strukturen des Deutschen besser zu erfassen.
Als Anwendungsbeispiel dient der Vergleich der Wissenschaftssprachen von Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Die beiden Fächer werden oft als Teildisziplinen der Germanistik zusammengefasst. Ihre wissenschaftliche Praxis unterscheidet sich jedoch systematisch hinsichtlich Forschungsdaten, Methoden und Erkenntnisinteressen, was sich auch in den Wissenschaftssprachen niederschlägt.
Die erfolgreiche Wiederverwendung gesprochener Korpora muss fachspezifischen Evaluationskritierien genügen und erfordert daher eine flexible Korpusarchitektur, die durch multirepräsentationale (Verfügbarkeit eines akustischen Signals und einer Transliteration) und multisituationale Daten (Variabilität von Situationen bzw. Aufgaben) gekennzeichnet ist. Diese Kriterien werden in einer Fallstudie zur /eː/-Diphthongisierung polnischer Deutschlerner/-innen angewendet und diskutiert. Die Fallstudie repliziert die Ergebnisse der /eː/-Diphthongisierung bei Bildbenennungen von Nimz (2016). Vor der Wiederverwendung werden weitere fachspezifische Evaluationskriterien überprüft, wie Multisituationalität, Aufnahmequalitäten, Erweiterbarkeit, vorhandene Metadaten und vorhandene Dokumentation. Nach der Replikationsstudie werden die Herausforderungen für eine Umsetzung der Wiederverwendung bezüglich Datenmanagement, Workflows und Data Literacy in Forschungs- und Lehrkontexten diskutiert.
Der vorliegende Beitrag erörtert am Beispiel des aktuell im Aufbau befindlichen Korpus GiesKaNe (= Gie[ßen]Ka[ssel]Ne[uhochdeutsch]) grundlegende Fragen nach dem Verhältnis von Standard und Innovation bei der Erweiterung der Korpuslandschaft durch neue Korpora. Bei jedem neu zu erstellenden Korpus stellt sich die Frage, inwieweit man den bereits etablierten Standards folgt, oder ob es legitim oder vielleicht sogar notwendig ist, neue Modelle der Annotation linguistischer Kategorien zu entwickeln. In diesem Sinne bespricht der Beitrag die Grenzen einer reinen Modellübernahme mit Bezug auf das POS-Tagging in anderen historischen Referenzkorpora und mit Bezug auf TIGER als Baumbank für das Gegenwartsdeutsche. Um trotz der Arbeit mit einer innovativen Alternative dem Prinzip der Interoperabilität gerecht zu werden, wird im Beitrag die Arbeit mit maschinellem Lernen ins Spiel gebracht. Dieses ermöglicht es, aus den vorhandenen Textoberflächenmerkmalen und den vorliegenden Annotationen auch alternative Annotationsmodelle abzuleiten und mittels einer Mehrebenenannotation anzubieten, sodass ein Korpus den Anforderungen an interoperable Nutzbarkeit und wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisfortschritt gleichermaßen gerecht werden kann.
Der Beitrag thematisiert den Zusammenhang von Korpusaufbereitung, Datenanreicherung und Nutzungsszenarien im Kontext des Discourse Lab, das an der TU Darmstadt und der Universität Heidelberg betrieben und in linguistischen und interdisziplinären Forschungs- und Lehrprojekten genutzt wird. Für die Diskursforschung sind Korpora genauso konstitutiv wie die Einbeziehung von Kontexten des Sprachgebrauchs in die Analyse. Daher ist die Frage nach Repräsentationsformaten von Kontexten besonders wichtig. Eine große Rolle bei der korpuslinguistischen Kontextualisierung spielen auch Annotationen. Das wird am Darmstädter-Tagblatt-Korpus, den Plenarprotokollen des Deutschen Bundestags und den Korpora der DFG-Forschungsgruppe Kontroverse Diskurse diskutiert.
So far, Sepedi negations have been considered more from the point of view of lexicographical treatment. Theoretical works on Sepedi have been used for this purpose, setting as an objective a neat description of these negations in a (paper) dictionary. This paper is from a different perspective: instead of theoretical works, corpus linguistic methods are used: (1) a Sepedi corpus is examined on the basis of existing descriptions of the occurrences of a relevant verb, looking at its negated forms from a purely prescriptive point of view; (2) a "corpus-driven" strategy is employed, looking only for sequences of negation particles (or morphemes) in order to list occurring constructions, without taking into account the verbs occurring in them, apart from their endings. The approach in (2) is only intended to show a possible methodology to extend existing theories on occurring negations. We would also like to try to help lexicographers to establish a frequency-based order of entries of possible negation forms in their dictionaries by showing them the number of respective occurrences. As with all corpus linguistic work, however, we must regard corpus evidence not as representative, but as tendencies of language use that can be detected and described. This is especially true for Sepedi, for which only few and small corpora exist. This paper also describes the resources and tools used to create the necessary corpus and also how it was annotated with part of speech and lemmas. Exploring the quality of available Sepedi part-of-speech taggers concerning verbs, negation morphemes and subject concords may be a positive side result.
Der Beitrag illustriert die Nutzung des Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) für interaktionslinguistische Fragestellungen anhand einer exemplarischen Studie. Zunächst werden die Stratifikation (Datenkomposition) des Korpus, das zugrundeliegende Datenmodell und dessen Annotationsebenen sowie Typen von Untersuchungsinteressen vorgestellt, für die das Korpus nutzbar ist. Im Hauptteil wird Schritt für Schritt anhand einer Studie zur Verwendung des Formats was heißt X in der sozialen Interaktion gezeigt, wie mit FOLK relevante Daten gefunden und analysiert werden können. Abschließend weisen wir auf einige Vorsichtsmaßnahmen bei der Benutzung des Korpus hin.
The QUEST (QUality ESTablished) project aims at ensuring the reusability of audio-visual datasets (Wamprechtshammer et al., 2022) by devising quality criteria and curating processes. RefCo (Reference Corpora) is an initiative within QUEST in collaboration with DoReCo (Documentation Reference Corpus, Paschen et al. (2020)) focusing on language documentation projects. Previously, Aznar and Seifart (2020) introduced a set of quality criteria dedicated to documenting fieldwork corpora. Based on these criteria, we establish a semi-automatic review process for existing and work-in-progress corpora, in particular for language documentation. The goal is to improve the quality of a corpus by increasing its reusability. A central part of this process is a template for machine-readable corpus documentation and automatic data verification based on this documentation. In addition to the documentation and automatic verification, the process involves a human review and potentially results in a RefCo certification of the corpus. For each of these steps, we provide guidelines and manuals. We describe the evaluation process in detail, highlight the current limits for automatic evaluation and how the manual review is organized accordingly.
Metadata provides important information relevant both to finding and understanding corpus data. Meaningful linguistic data requires both reasonable annotations and documentation of these annotations. This documentation is part of the metadata of a dataset. While corpus documentation has often been provided in the form of accompanying publications, machinereadable metadata, both containing the bibliographic information and documenting the corpus data, has many advantages. Metadata standards allow for the development of common tools and interfaces. In this paper I want to add a new perspective from an archive’s point of view and look at the metadata provided for four learner corpora and discuss the suitability of established standards for machine-readable metadata. I am are aware that there is ongoing work towards metadata standards for learner corpora. However, I would like to keep the discussion going and add another point of view: increasing findability and reusability of learner corpora in an archiving context.
This paper describes the TEI-based ISO standard 24624:2016 ‘Transcription of spoken language’ and other formats used within CLARIN for spoken language resources. It assesses the current state of support for the standard and the interoperability between these formats and with rele- vant tools and services. The main idea behind the paper is that a digital infrastructure providing language resources and services to researchers should also allow the combined use of resources and/or services from different contexts. This requires syntactic and semantic interoperability. We propose a solution based on the ISO/TEI format and describe the necessary steps for this format to work as an exchange format with basic semantic interoperability for spoken language resources across the CLARIN infrastructure and beyond.
This article presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena which cause difficulties in the analysis of user-generated texts found on the web and in social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework of syntactic analysis. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this article is twofold: (1) to provide a condensed, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks—based on available literature—along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The overarching goal of this article is to provide a common framework for researchers interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus promoting cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been central to the spirit of UD.
Der Beitrag behandelt methodische Fragen der Korpuspragmatik im Bereich der politischen Sprache am Beispiel sprachlicher Praktiken der Moralisierung im Deutschen Bundestag. Wir stellen einen Ansatz zur Erarbeitung pragmatischer Strukturmuster – ,Pragmeme‘ – des Moralisierens vor, der auf kollaborativer Annotation basiert. Den Datensatz bildet das linguistisch aufbereitete Korpus der Plenarprotokolle des Deutschen Bundestags 1949–2017. Zur Eruierung geeigneter Beobachtungspassagen wurde ein Thesaurus von Moralwörtern erarbeitet und deren Verteilung gemessen. Dadurch haben sich drei Beobachtungsperioden für Pilotkorpora ergeben: 1949, 1983 und 2015. In diesen Beobachtungsperioden wurden Zufallsstichproben von Sätzen mit Moralwörtern gezogen und annotiert. Im Beitrag stellen wir die einzelnen Schritte und vorläufigen Ergebnisse des Projekts vor und diskutieren Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Verfahrens.
Twenty-two historical encyclopedias encoded in TEI: a new resource for the Digital Humanities
(2020)
This paper accompanies the corpus publication of EncycNet, a novel XML/TEI annotated corpus of 22 historical German encyclopedias from the early 18th to early 20th century. We describe the creation and annotation of the corpus, including the rationale for its development, suggested methodology for TEI annotation, possible use cases and future work. While many well-developed annotation standards for lexical resources exist, none can adequately model the encyclopedias at hand, and we therefore suggest how the TEI Lex-0 standard may be modified with additional guidelines for the annotation of historical encyclopedias. As the digitization and annotation of historical encyclopedias are settling on TEI as the de facto standard, our methodology may inform similar projects.
Der vorliegende Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit einigen Aspekten der variationistischen Annotation von Korpusdaten. Anhand von mehreren Beispielen wird gezeigt, dass der Vergleich von Kategorien in einem Korpus oder der Vergleich von zwei Korpora nur unter bestimmten Bedingungen variationistisch interpretiert werden kann. Da die Definition von Variablen oft schwierig ist und die Zuordnung von Varianten zu Variablen je nach Forschungsfrage unterschiedlich sein kann, müssen Variablen und Varianten in einem Korpus (für alle transparent und nachvollziehbar) annotiert werden. Dabei wird für eine offene Korpusarchitektur argumentiert, in der in einem bestehenden Korpus jederzeit Variablen und Varianten hinzugefügt werden können.
We present web services which implement a workflow for transcripts of spoken language following the TEI guidelines, in particular ISO 24624:2016 “Language resource management – Transcription of spoken language”. The web services are available at our website and will be available via the CLARIN infrastructure, including the Virtual Language Observatory and WebLicht.
Corpus REDEWIEDERGABE
(2020)
This article presents the corpus REDEWIEDERGABE, a German-language historical corpus with detailed annotations for speech, thought and writing representation (ST&WR). With approximately 490,000 tokens, it is the largest resource of its kind. It can be used to answer literary and linguistic research questions and serve as training material for machine learning. This paper describes the composition of the corpus and the annotation structure, discusses some methodological decisions and gives basic statistics about the forms of ST&WR found in this corpus.
We present a fine-grained NER annotations scheme with 30 labels and apply it to German data. Building on the OntoNotes 5.0 NER inventory, our scheme is adapted for a corpus of transcripts of biographic interviews by adding categories for AGE and LAN(guage) and also adding label classes for various numeric and temporal expressions. Applying the scheme to the spoken data as well as a collection of teaser tweets from newspaper sites, we can confirm its generality for both domains, also achieving good inter-annotator agreement. We also show empirically how our inventory relates to the well-established 4-category NER inventory by re-annotating a subset of the GermEval 2014 NER coarse-grained dataset with our fine label inventory. Finally, we use a BERT-based system to establish some baselines for NER tagging on our two new datasets. Global results in in-domain testing are quite high on the two datasets, near what was achieved for the coarse inventory on the CoNLLL2003 data. Cross-domain testing produces much lower results due to the severe domain differences.
The paper presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena of user-generated texts found in web and social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to provide a short, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks - based on available literature - along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The main goal of this paper is to provide a common framework for those teams interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus enabling cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been in the spirit of UD.
We present a new resource for German causal language, with annotations in context for verbs, nouns and adpositions. Our dataset includes 4,390 annotated instances for more than 150 different triggers. The annotation scheme distinguishes three different types of causal events (CONSEQUENCE, MOTIVATION, PURPOSE). We also provide annotations for semantic roles, i.e. of the cause and effect for the causal event as well as the actor and affected party, if present. In the paper, we present inter-annotator agreement scores for our dataset and discuss problems for annotating causal language. Finally, we present experiments where we frame causal annotation as a sequence labelling problem and report baseline results for the prediciton of causal arguments and for predicting different types of causation.
Little strokes fell great oaks. Creating CoRoLa, the reference corpus of contemporary Romanian
(2019)
The paper presents the quite long-standing tradition of Romanian corpus acquisition and processing, which reaches its peak with the reference corpus of contemporary Romanian language (CoRoLa). The paper describes decisions behind the kinds of texts collected, as well as processing and annotation steps, highlighting the structure and importance of metadata to the corpus. The reader is also introduced to the three ways in which (s)he can plunge into the rich linguistic data of the corpus, waiting to be discovered. Besides querying the corpus, word embeddings extracted from it are useful to various natural language processing applications and for linguists, when user-friendly interfaces offer them the possibility to exploit the data.
This paper presents types and annotation layers of reply relations in computer- mediated communication (CMC). Reply relations hold between post units in CMC interactions and describe references from one given post to a previous post. We classify three types of reply relations in CMC interactions: first, technical replies, i. e. the possibility to reply directly to a previous post by clicking a ‘reply’ button; second, indentations, e. g. in wiki talk pages in which users insert their contributions in the existing talk page by indenting them and third, interpretative reply relations, i. e. the reply action is not realised formally but signalled by other structural or linguistics means such as address markers ‘@’, greetings, citations and/or Q-A structures. We take a look at existing practices in the description and representation of such relations in corpora and examples of chat, Wikipedia talk pages, Twitter and blogs. We then provide an annotation proposal that combines the different levels of description and representation of reply relations and which adheres to the schemas and practices for encoding CMC corpus documents within the TEI framework as defined by the TEI CMC SIG. It constitutes a prerequisite for correctly identifying higher levels of interactional relations such as dialogue acts or discussion trees.
This contribution presents a quantitative approach to speech, thought and writing representation (ST&WR) and steps towards its automatic detection. Automatic detection is necessary for studying ST&WR in a large number of texts and thus identifying developments in form and usage over time and in different types of texts. The contribution summarizes results of a pilot study: First, it describes the manual annotation of a corpus of short narrative texts in relation to linguistic descriptions of ST&WR. Then, two different techniques of automatic detection – a rule-based and a machine learning approach – are described and compared. Evaluation of the results shows success with automatic detection, especially for direct and indirect ST&WR.
This paper analyses reply relations in computer-mediated communication (CMC), which occur between post units in CMC interactions and which describe references between posts. We take a look at existing practices in the description and annotation of such relations in chat, wiki talk, and blog corpora. We distinguish technical reply structures, indentation structures, and interpretative reply relations, which include reply relations induced by linguistic markers. We sort out the different levels of description and annotation that are involved and propose a solution for their combined representation within the TEI annotation framework.
Es gibt viele linguistische Forschungsfragen, für deren Beantwortung man Korpusdaten qualitativ und quantitativ auswerten möchte. Beide Auswertungsmethoden können sich auf den Korpustext, aber auch auf Annotationsebenen beziehen. Jede Art von Annotation, also Kategorisierung, stellt einen kontrollierten und notwendigen Informationsverlust dar. Das bedeutet, dass jede Art von Kategorisierung auch eine Interpretation der Daten ist. In den meisten großen Korpora wird zu jeder vorgesehenen Annotationsebene, wie z. B. Wortart-Ebene oder Lemma-Ebene, genau eine Interpretation angeboten. In den letzten Jahren haben sich neben den großen, ,,flach“ annotierten Korpora Korpusmodelle herausgebildet, mit denen man konfligierende Informationen kodieren kann, die so genannten Mehrebenen-Modelle (multilevel standoff corpora), in denen alle Annotationsebenen unabhängig vom Text gespeichert werden und nur auf bestimmte Textanker verweisen. Ich argumentiere anhand der Fehlerannotation in einem Lernerkorpus dafür, dass zumindest Korpora, in denen es stark variierende Annotationsbedürfnisse und umstrittene Analysen geben kann, davon profitieren, in Mehrebenen-Modellen kodiert zu werden.
This paper analyses reply relations in computer-mediated communication (CMC), which occur between post units in CMC interactions and which describe references between posts. We take a look at existing practices in the description and annotation of such relations in chat, wiki talk, and blog corpora. We distinguish technical reply structures, indentation structures, and interpretative reply relations, which include reply relations induced by linguistic markers. We sort out the different levels of description and annotation that are involved and propose a solution for their combined representation within the TEI annotation framework.
A syntax-based scheme for the annotation and segmentation of German spoken language interactions
(2018)
Unlike corpora of written language where segmentation can mainly be derived from orthographic punctuation marks, the basis for segmenting spoken language corpora is not predetermined by the primary data, but rather has to be established by the corpus compilers. This impedes consistent querying and visualization of such data. Several ways of segmenting have been proposed,
some of which are based on syntax. In this study, we developed and evaluated annotation and segmentation guidelines in reference to the topological field model for German. We can show that these guidelines are used consistently across annotators. We also investigated the influence of various interactional settings with a rather simple measure, the word-count per segment and unit-type. We observed that the word count and the distribution of each unit type differ in varying interactional settings and that our developed segmentation and annotation guidelines are used consistently across annotators. In conclusion, our syntax-based segmentations reflect interactional properties that are intrinsic to the social interactions that participants are involved in. This can be used for further analysis of social interaction and opens the possibility for automatic segmentation of transcripts.
Der vorliegende Band befasst sich mit dem Stand und der Entwicklung von Forschungsinfrastrukturen für die germanistische Linguistik und einigen angrenzenden Bereichen. Einen zentralen Aspekt dabei bildet die Notwendigkeit, Kooperativität in der Wissenschaft im institutionellen Sinne, aber auch in Hinsicht auf die wissenschaftliche Praxis zu organisieren. Dies geschieht in Verbunden als Kooperationsstrukturen, wobei Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie miteinander verbunden werden. Als zentraler Forschungsressource kommen dabei Korpora und ihrer Erschließung durch spezielle, linguistisch motivierte Informationssysteme besondere Bedeutung zu. Auf der Ebene der Daten werden durch Annotations- und Modellierungsstandards die Voraussetzung für eine nachhaltige Nutzbarkeit derartiger Ressourcen geschaffen.
This paper presents an extension to the Stuttgart-Tübingen TagSet, the standard part-of-speech tag set for German, for the annotation of spoken language. The additional tags deal with hesitations, backchannel signals, interruptions, onomatopoeia and uninterpretable material. They allow one to capture phenomena specific to spoken language while, at the same time, preserving inter-operability with already existing corpora of written language.
We present the annotation of information structure in the MULI project. To learn more about the information structuring means in prosody, syntax and discourse, theory- independent features were defined for each level. We describe the features and illustrate them on an example sentence. To investigate the interplay of features, the representation has to allow for inspecting all three layers at the same time. This is realised by a stand-off XML mark-up with the word as the basic unit. The theory-neutral XML stand-off annotation allows integrating this resource with other linguistic resources such as the Tiger Treebank for German or the Penn treebank for English.
While written corpora can be exploited without any linguistic annotations, speech corpora need at least a basic transcription to be of any use for linguistic research. The basic annotation of speech data usually consists of time-aligned orthographic transcriptions. To answer phonetic or phonological research questions, phonetic transcriptions are needed as well. However, manual annotation is very time-consuming and requires considerable skill and near-native competence. Therefore it can take years of speech corpus compilation and annotation before any analyses can be carried out. In this paper, approaches that address the transcription bottleneck of speech corpus exploitation are presented and discussed, including crowdsourcing the orthographic transcription, automatic phonetic alignment, and query-driven annotation. Currently, query-driven annotation and automatic phonetic alignment are being combined and applied in two speech research projects at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), whereas crowdsourcing the orthographic transcription still awaits implementation.
The paper reports on the results of a scientific colloquium dedicated to the creation of standards and best practices which are needed to facilitate the integration of language resources for CMC stemming from different origins and the linguistic analysis of CMC phenomena in different languages and genres. The key issue to be solved is that of interoperability – with respect to the structural representation of CMC genres, linguistic annotations metadata, and anonymization/pseudonymization schemas. The objective of the paper is to convince more projects to partake in a discussion about standards for CMC corpora and for the creation of a CMC corpus infrastructure across languages and genres. In view of the broad range of corpus projects which are currently underway all over Europe, there is a great window of opportunity for the creation of standards in a bottom-up approach.
We present SPLICR, the Web-based Sustainability Platform for Linguistic Corpora and Resources. The system is aimed at people who work in Linguistics or Computational Linguistics: a comprehensive database of metadata records can be explored in order to find language resources that could be appropriate for one’s specific research needs. SPLICR also provides an interface that enables users to query and to visualise corpora. The project in which the system is being developed aims at sustainably archiving the ca. 60 language resources that have been constructed in three collaborative research centres. Our project has two primary goals: (a) To process and to archive sustainably the resources so that they are still available to the research community in five, ten, or even 20 years time. (b) To enable researchers to query the resources both on the level of their metadata as well as on the level of linguistic annota-tions. In more general terms, our goal is to enable solutions that leverage the interoperability, reusability, and sustainability of heterogeneous collections of language resources.
The paper presents best practices and results from projects dedicated to the creation of corpora of computer-mediated communication and social media interactions (CMC) from four different countries. Even though there are still many open issues related to building and annotating corpora of this type, there already exists a range of tested solutions which may serve as a starting point for a comprehensive discussion on how future standards for CMC corpora could (and should) be shaped like.
Feedback utterances are among the most frequent in dialogue. Feedback is also a crucial aspect of all linguistic theories that take social interaction involving language into account. However, determining communicative functions is a notoriously difficult task both for human interpreters and systems. It involves an interpretative process that integrates various sources of information. Existing work on communicative function classification comes from either dialogue act tagging where it is generally coarse grained concerning the feed- back phenomena or it is token-based and does not address the variety of forms that feed- back utterances can take. This paper introduces an annotation framework, the dataset and the related annotation campaign (involving 7 raters to annotate nearly 6000 utterances). We present its evaluation not merely in terms of inter-rater agreement but also in terms of usability of the resulting reference dataset both from a linguistic research perspective and from a more applicative viewpoint.
This paper is a contribution to the ongoing discussion on treebank annotation schemes and their impact on PCFG parsing results. We provide a thorough comparison of two German treebanks: the TIGER treebank and the TüBa-D/Z. We use simple statistics on sentence length and vocabulary size, and more refined methods such as perplexity and its correlation with PCFG parsing results, as well as a Principal Components Analysis. Finally we present a qualitative evaluation of a set of 100 sentences from the TüBa- D/Z, manually annotated in the TIGER as well as in the TüBa-D/Z annotation scheme, and show that even the existence of a parallel subcorpus does not support a straightforward and easy comparison of both annotation schemes.
The aim of this paper is to highlight the actual need for corpora that have been annotated based on acoustic information. The acoustic information should be coded in features or properties and is needed to inform further processing systems, i.e. to present a basis for a speech recognition system using linguistic information. Feature annotation of existing corpora in combination with segmental annotation can provide a powerful training material for speech recognition systems, but will as well challenge the further processing of features to segments and syllables. We present here the theoretical preliminaries for our multilingual feature extraction system, that we are currently working on.
Recent studies focussed on the question whether less-configurational languages like German are harder to parse than English, or whether the lower parsing scores are an artefact of treebank encoding schemes and data structures, as claimed by Kübler et al. (2006). This claim is based on the assumption that PARSEVAL metrics fully reflect parse quality across treebank encoding schemes. In this paper we present new experiments to test this claim. We use the PARSEVAL metric, the Leaf-Ancestor metric as well as a dependency-based evaluation, and present novel approaches measuring the effect of controlled error insertion on treebank trees and parser output. We also provide extensive past-parsing crosstreebank conversion. The results of the experiments show that, contrary to Kübler et al. (2006), the question whether or not German is harder to parse than English remains undecided.
In this paper, we describe preliminary results from an ongoing experiment wherein we classify two large unstructured text corpora—a web corpus and a newspaper corpus—by topic domain (or subject area). Our primary goal is to develop a method that allows for the reliable annotation of large crawled web corpora with meta data required by many corpus linguists. We are especially interested in designing an annotation scheme whose categories are both intuitively interpretable by linguists and firmly rooted in the distribution of lexical material in the documents. Since we use data from a web corpus and a more traditional corpus, we also contribute to the important field of corpus comparison and corpus evaluation. Technically, we use (unsupervised) topic modeling to automatically induce topic distributions over gold standard corpora that were manually annotated for 13 coarse-grained topic domains. In a second step, we apply supervised machine learning to learn the manually annotated topic domains using the previously induced topics as features. We achieve around 70% accuracy in 10-fold cross validations. An analysis of the errors clearly indicates, however, that a revised classification scheme and larger gold standard corpora will likely lead to a substantial increase in accuracy.
There have been several attempts to annotate communicative functions to utterances of verbal feedback in English previously. Here, we suggest an annotation scheme for verbal and non-verbal feedback utterances in French including the categories base, attitude, previous and visual. The data comprises conversations, maptasks and negotiations from which we extracted ca. 13,000 candidate feedback utterances and gestures. 12 students were recruited for the annotation campaign of ca. 9,500 instances. Each instance was annotated by between 2 and 7 raters. The evaluation of the annotation agreement resulted in an average best-pair kappa of 0.6. While the base category with the values acknowledgement, evaluation, answer, elicit and other achieves good agreement, this is not the case for the other main categories. The data sets, which also include automatic extractions of lexical, positional and acoustic features, are freely available and will further be used for machine learning classification experiments to analyse the form-function relationship of feedback.
Linguistische Annotationen für die Analyse von Gliederungsstrukturen wissenschaftlicher Texte
(2012)
This paper describes a corpus of Japanese task-oriented dialogues, i.e. its data, annotations, analysis methodology and preliminary results for the modeling of co-referential phenomena. Current corpus based approaches to co-reference concentrate on textual data from English or other European languages. Hence, the emerging language-general models of co-reference miss input from dialogue data of non-European languages. We aim to fill this gap and contribute to a model of co-reference on various language-specific and language-general levels.
This paper deals with the problem of how to interrelate theory-specific treebanks and how to transform one treebank format to another. Currently, two approaches to achieve these goals can be differentiated. The first creates a mapping algorithm between treebank formats. Categories of a source format are transformed into a target format via a given set of general or language-specific mapping rules. The second relates treebanks via a transformation to a general model of linguistic categories, for example based on the EAGLES recommendations for syntactic annotations of corpora, or relying on the HPSG framework. This paper proposes a new methodology as a solution for these desiderata.
The paper discusses from various angles the morphosyntactic annotation of DeReKo, the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Mannheim. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part covers the practical and technical aspects of this endeavor. We present results from a recent evaluation of tools for the annotation of German text resources that have been applied to DeReKo. These tools include commercial products, especially Xerox' Finite State Tools and the Machinese products developed by the Finnish company Connexor Oy, as well as software for which academic licenses are available free of charge for academic institutions, e.g. Helmut Schmid's Tree Tagger. The second part focuses on the linguistic interpretability of the corpus annotations and more general methodological considerations concerning scientifically sound empirical linguistic research. The main challenge here is that unlike the texts themselves, the morphosyntactic annotations of DeReKo do not have the status of observed data; instead they constitute a theory and implementation-dependent interpretation. In addition, because of the enormous size of DeReKo, a systematic manual verification of the automatic annotations is not feasible. In consequence, the expected degree of inaccuracy is very high, particularly wherever linguistically challenging phenomena, such as lexical or grammatical variation, are concerned. Given these facts, a researcher using the annotations blindly will run the risk of not actually studying the language but rather the annotation tool or the theory behind it. The paper gives an overview of possible pitfalls and ways to circumvent them and discusses the opportunities offered by using annotations in corpus-based and corpus-driven grammatical research against the background of a scientifically sound methodology.
Usenet is a large online resource containing user-generated messages (news articles) organised in discussion groups (newsgroups) which deal with a wide variety of different topics. We describe the download, conversion, and annotation of a comprehensive German news corpus for integration in DeReKo, the German Reference Corpus hosted at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim.
Discourse segmentation is the division of a text into minimal discourse segments, which form the leaves in the trees that are used to represent discourse structures. A definition of elementary discourse segments in German is provided by adapting widely used segmentation principles for English minimal units, while considering punctuation, morphology, sytax, and aspects of the logical document structure of a complex text type, namely scientific articles. The algorithm and implementation of a discourse segmenter based on these principles is presented, as well an evaluation of test runs.